The Lion-tailed macaque belongs to the family of Cercopithecidae. And belong to the genus and species of Macaca silenus. They are an old world monkey and the most rare of the macaques. The location of these macaques is in the Western Ghats Mountains in India. They are primarily arboreal in the rain forest but go onto the ground to gather food. “They live in southwest India in pockets of evergreen forests, called sholas, in the Western Ghats range. They live at elevations between 2,000 and 3,500 feet” (Smithsonian National Zoological, 2000). The Lion-tailed macaque is diurnal. The closes relatives of them are the Pig-tailed macaques and Baboons.
The age of maturity for females is five years while males maturity age is eight years. The pregnancy length is five and a half months. Captive Lion-tailed macaques birth patterns are at random throughout the year but the wild ones showed a pattern for births. “Most births occurred from January to April (70%) and September to December (19%)” (Kaumanns, et al., 1429). “80-100% of female and male infants have body contact with mothers up to 15 days after birth” (Kuamanns, et al., 350). Sometimes a mother can give birth to twins. Mother and son interactions are present longer then the interaction between mother and daughter. After nine months the male infants are weaned off of their mothers. But female infants are weaned off of their mother by seven months. After ten and a half months the infants are completely independent. Adult males do not have interaction with offspring, once they mate with female they have no involvement. Once the offspring reach maturity the female will stay in the troop and the males will leave the troop.
Lion-tailed macaques have long, smooth black hair with gray...
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Kumar, M.A., Kumara, H.N., Sharma, A.K., Singh, M. (2006). Dominance hierarchy and social grooming in female lion-tailed macaques (Macaca silenus) in Western Ghats, India,
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I visited the Sacramento Zoo during the afternoon of April 21, 2017. The weather was wonderful, sunny, warm, and there was a slight breeze. It got a bit more breezy the longer I was there. Visiting the zoo to observe primates allowed me to become a little more aware of how primatologists study primates. Even though I’ve been to many different zoos several different times, I never realized how many primates were associated with the zoos, as well as the variety of primates in the zoos. The Sacramento Zoo has eight different primates, all in different classifications, superfamilies, or subfamilies. While observing the Chimpanzees, White-Handed Gibbon, Mongoose Lemur, White-Faced Saki, and the Wolf’s Guenon I could see the differences
According to Klaus and Kennell, there are specific events, including skin-to-skin contact between mother and infant that must occur directly following the birth of a primate infant. This maximizes the chances of survival for the newborn not only because their mother is a source of food, but also because they will learn the culture they need to be successful in their environment. In the study, Klaus and Kennell test how much time a baby spends crying when they are separated from their mother. They concluded the increased time in babies that were separated was due to the anxiety that separation caused. The difficulty in this is that the cause of the baby’s distress is subjective. Also the notion of critical period proposed that the bonds and lessons taught during that time could not be developed later.
I chose to study the behaviors of the Spider monkey and the Sifaka. I chose them for a few reasons, one being that Spider monkeys are incredibly adorable and two Sifaka’s remind me of a childhood television show, Zoboomafoo. These two primate groups also struck my attention in class, so this project was a perfect opportunity to dig a little deeper. The behaviors I chose to observe were social interactions and locomotion. The biggest differences I noticed between the two primates were that the Spider monkeys have the prehensile tails and without exerting extra energy is able to engage in a few common locomotion patterns such as quadrupedal, suspensory and bipedalisim. Where as Sifaka’s lack a tail, and remain upright at all times, and the only way they don’t waste energy moving around is to jump through the trees. They both hangout in troops, eat similar things and mainly live up high in the trees-- but Spider monkeys care for their own young for up to a year while the Sifaka’s usually engage in non-maternal infant care.
The animal I have chosen to study is the Japanese macaque, more commonly known as the Japanese snow monkey. Sir David Attenborough recently described the macaque as “one of the most successful and versatile of all primates”, commending its capacity to be “versatile, resilient, enterprising, tough and capable of surviving in extreme conditions”. This essay will continue by examining the Japanese macaque in a number of ways. Firstly, I will describe the physical characteristics of the animal, paying particular attention to the way in which their appearance has adapted to enable them to dominate in their habitat. Secondly, I will discuss the environment in which the macaques live in and the unique capabilities they maximise to develop a strategy ensuring longevity of the breed. Finally, I will consider the various competitors to survival that exist in the macaque’s environment.
Despite the fact laboratory studies are vital in order to acquire useful information about culture in primates, it also places the primates in a stricter, unnatural, or unusual location for animals, therefore not allowing them to show their full potential as they do in the wild (Uehara, 2004, p. 108). Cultural behavior in tools (kin based culture) The primate’s intelligence is extraordinary considering how they connect with their environment to survive in everyday life. The ability to learn to use tools to improve the primate’s life is an example of culture and how they survive.
In the early 1950s, Harry Harlow’s famous study of rhesus monkeys to determine attachment relationships demonstrated that infant rhesus monkeys raised in isolation, preferred the comfort of a cloth-covered surrogate mother to that of a wire-mesh surrogate with an attached feeding bottle. Harlow wished to dispute the traditional view that affection and mother–infant attachment was based on food, and his experiments had clearly demonstrated that the foundations of attachment were not associated solely with the need for nourishment. A more important facet of human nature was that the profoundly meaningful act of physical intimacy plays a greater role in the health of an infant than nourishment alone. (Vicedo 2009)
Primate socioecology studies the impact of ecology on the social behavior of primates. A socio-ecological model focuses on the behavioural trends in individuals and the resulting social system that arises as a result (Schaik, C. et al., 1996). Another main principle of socioecology is to understand the evolution of social systems, including group characteristics and the social to mating dynamics. The theoretical framework of socioecology concentrates on the concept of traditionally largely impacting ecological factors especially predations risk and resource distribution. This framework is supported by a multitude of tests correlating with the specific predictions from the model (Kappeler, et al., 2003). Socioecology was first demonstrated in
Humans and non-human primates have many behaviors and characteristics in common. All humans and non-human primates also share physical and beha...
I observed chimpanzees in the Kimberly-Clark Chimpanzee Forest exhibit at the Dallas zoo. These African apes, like humans, are hominoids and fall into the larger category of catarrhines. Their scientific classification is Pan troglodytes. There were about ten chimpanzees in that habitat. Most of them were grown adults, except two children. They were robust and had black fur. The average weight of the chimps was listed on a display to be about 115 pounds.
There are at least 145 living species of the suborder Anthropoidea . Over 90% of them are monkeys. The remaining species are apes and humans. The anthropoids (members of the suborder Anthropoidea) have been the most successful primates in populating the earth. They are generally larger, more intelligent, and have more highly developed eyes than the prosimians.
Harlow ran a series of experiments in which he separated infant rhesus monkeys from their mothers six to twelve hours after birth (6). At first he raised the infant monkeys i...
a) The Daintree rainforest at Cape Tribulation, in far north Queensland is diverse in many ways. It holds 12 of the 19 primitive plant families in the world (Cairns Today, 2007). The forest covers an area of 1100 square kilometres and is approximately eighty kilometres wide. This dense and luxuriant rainforest has the greatest diversity than any other in Australia and many in the world. The Daintree is also the home of rare and threatened of being extinct plant and animal species. The importance of this ecosystem is the very high. This ecosystem contributes to the overall health of this plant in many ways. The diversity contributes in the breakdown of pollution and helps to control the climate to name a few. This rainforest also is a great ‘carbon sink’. It has many photosynthesising plants and this allows the control of carbon dioxide (CO2). The plants take in the CO2 from the atmosphere and return oxygen (O2)
After researching and observing the lives of orangutans I can support my hypothesis. The orangutans are restricted into a small area, fed when the trainers feed them, and live on the ground because there are no trees causing them to have a different lifestyle than the wild orangutans. The captive orangutans are taken care of by the trainer and never have to struggle to get food. They seem to sit and sleep at the same time, for majority of the time I was observing. There are no predators for them to have to fight off since they are separated, where in the wild they would have to protect themselves and in some cases their offspring. If an adult female were to give birth while in captivity, the offspring would grow up to have a completely different lifestyle than a juvenile in the wild. The juvenile is cared for and protected by the trainers more than they would be by their own mother. Being in captivity gives the primates the option of medicine in cases of sickness or an injuries. In the wild the primates have to live without the nurture of these trainers which is why they tend to live...
More than 90 percent of primate species live in African, Asian, and Neotropic rain forests. Any outside force that alters the size and structure of these forests will directly affect primate populations. The major players that cause habitat...
MATING: Siberian tigers mate in winter months and following a 3-5 month gestation period, the female produces 3-4 cubs. Cubs weigh just over 2 pounds each and are born blind. The small litter of cubs stay close to their mother for the first 8 weeks of life. By 18 months, the young are capable of hunting on their own. Young stay with their mother for 2 years, at which time they leave the pact and travel solo. The life span of the Siberian tiger is 15 years in the wild, and significantly longer in captivity.